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“I wouldn’t know,” Sal said bitterly.
He shrugged. “Master’s been busy. You should have been patient.”
“Right,” she said contemptuously. “I should spend my time shopping, maybe getting my nails done, while the war comes closer every day. All Mircea knows how to do is talk! Rafe ending up like that . . . It could be any of us next! Tony may be a worm, but at least he knows how to act!”
I’d been looking back and forth, trying to keep up, but finally something made sense. “Oh, God. Mircea never broke your bond. Tony is still your master.”
“And still giving me little tasks to perform, all the way from Faerie.”
I was hearing it, but I couldn’t believe it. Sal wasn’t some superspy. She wasn’t a traitor. She was just Sal. I’d known her all my life.
“You told me once you’d kill him if you ever saw him again!” I accused. “How can you take orders from him?”
“Because I don’t have a choice,” she spat. “I practically begged Mircea to break my bond, but all he did was talk: soon, soon. Well, it wasn’t soon enough!”
“But . . . Alphonse is fifty years younger than you!” I protested. “And he’s been able to ignore Tony’s orders for years! You don’t have to—”
She cut me off with a laugh. “Yeah. And he’s an idiot, you know? I taught him everything—how to talk, how to act, what to do to impress the boss. He’d be nothing without me. But power doesn’t care how smart you are. Doesn’t even care how old you are. Some people never reach master status, and others do it in a matter of decades! And I’ve never been strong. Why do you think I put up with Alphonse? He was the only way I had any position at all.”
“That’s why we couldn’t catch you,” Marco said, lighting a cigarette. “It was pretty clever. Everyone was looking for the traitor among the old masters, the guys close enough to a Senate member for Myra to have wasted her time trying to turn them.”
“Which is why Tony decided to use me.”
“The Consuls aren’t here, as you can see,” Pritkin said, watching her narrowly. “Whatever your master ordered you to do, you’ve failed. Mircea can still break your bond. You have no reason to—”
He broke off at the identical expressions of disgust Sal and Marco were sending him. “Why the hell do you hang around this guy?” Marco asked me.
Pritkin looked at me, and I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way,” I told him numbly.
“Why not? If she is truly under a compulsion—”
“Vampire law doesn’t care about the why. It only cares about the result. Or in this case, the intended result. And Sal came back here intending to kill the leaders of the six vampire senates. It doesn’t get any worse than that.”
“Close, but no cigar,” Sal told me, sounding awfully unconcerned for someone facing certain death. “I’m just the doorman, you might say.” She held out her hand, and a shaft of light through the balcony doors lit up something on her open palm.
“My pentagram,” I said, recognizing it even from this distance. “You said you’d get it fixed.”
“Yeah. Only it’s a lot more useful broken.”
“I don’t get it.”
She laughed.“You know, I used to think it was ludicrous—you with Lord Mircea. I figured he was just using you, like everyone said. But lately, I’ve begun to think you two deserve each other. You’re just as clueless as he is!”
Marco tensed. “Give it to me,” he told her.
“Or what? You’ll kill me?” she asked incredulously. “You don’t have a lot of threats left, Marco.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Mircea didn’t specify how the traitor was to die, just told me to take care of it if anybody showed up. I got a lot of leeway here, Sal. Give me a reason to make it quick.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s tempting. Or I could follow Tony’s orders, and when his side wins, I not only don’t die, I get the position I always deserved. How about that instead?”
“Your side isn’t going to win,” Pritkin told her.
Sal ignored him. It looked like she was having fun. I was beginning to wonder how hard she had tried to resist Tony.
“Remember MAGIC?” she asked me. “Because this is gonna make that look like a sideshow.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “It’s just a ward. It can’t—”
